


Breaking Away and In Control

by Waistcoat35



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Alistaire needs a hug, Angst, Aurors, But no, Emotional Turmoil, Feels, Gen, Graves is sad, Hurt/Comfort, No shippings with the OC I promise, Sorry for the OC mention but I wanted to include my cinnamon roll, They all need hugs ok, Written at 2am please forgive me, i should be sorry, this is NOT okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-22
Updated: 2016-12-22
Packaged: 2018-09-11 03:39:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8952397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Waistcoat35/pseuds/Waistcoat35
Summary: Graves isn't okay - but neither are his fellow aurors. Perhaps they can heal together.





	

Percival rounds the corner and strides into his office, the door abruptly clicking shut with a slight wave of his hand. He feels like slamming it, if only to try and startle his fellow aurors into getting back to work. But he knows that in all honestly, nothing short of all-out terrifying them will remove the gazes from his back, the whispers and the wary looks when they think he isn't paying attention to them.

He's always paying attention, always listening - it's his job as a director to know what's going on, what everybody's up to. To know his aurors' capabilities and disadvantages he has to know his aurors - he's supposed to be aware of what they do and what they say and what bothers them. Even when he doesn't have to it is ingrained into him to do so.

However, there are times when he doesn't /want/to know these things just as much as he doesn't need to. It's suffocating, being fully aware of everything they think about him, the way they're practically tiptoeing around him all the time. He isn't normal anymore, he will probably never be /normal/again, and he's realised it by now - but none of them seem to be helping him /accept/ that. None of them seem prepared to let go of it, to stop trying to /fix/ him or /cure/ him or whatever it is they're attempting to do. 

He sinks into his chair with a barely suppressed groan, scowling to himself as he props his head up in his hands, elbows resting on the pine desk in front of him. He is tired - so very tired of this seemingly eternal wariness and sense of brokenness that stalks him everywhere he goes, until he is not sure whether it is the feeling he is running from or a newly instated part of himself. He wants to sleep and escape the emotions, the feelings for a dreamless slumber where everything is numb and he doesn't have to feel, doesn't have to think, doesn't have to /care/ because caring /hurts/ and it just make him more /vulnerable/ but he /can't bloody help it/ and he cares so much. He cares so much it burns him from the inside out, starting with his heart and slowly eating away at him. Caring is what is now making him fight tears. Six months ago the idea of shedding tears over his regrets and fears would have seemed a foreign notion to the man, who used to hide such things behind a slapped-on smirk or a barked order to get back to work. But the caring is indeed causing him to cry.

He cries for the people who Grindlewald hurt while wearing his face, who pale whenever they see him and feel terrible for it even though it's not their fault. He cries for a beaten and broken boy made of shadow, who couldn't be saved because those with the power to help him didn't /understand,/ didn't /listen/ to Newt Scamander, and it was Credence who paid the price. He cries for Tina Goldstein, his closest and perhaps most trusted auror, who believed in him and was hit in the face with a demotion and a death sentence he didn't give, but might as well have because if he'd fought harder, been stronger then this wouldn't have happened. He cries because Grindlewald did so many terrible things wearing his face and nobody suspected, everybody actually /believed/ that he was capable of backstabbing friends and sentencing innocent people to a death worse than any other. Then he cries some more because somebody did notice, and almost paid the greatest price of all.

Her name is Alistaire - she dislikes it, finds it far too long and curly and old-fashioned, but he finds it rather distinguished despite how her colleagues tease her for it. She is by far one of the youngest aurors on his team, not six years out of Ilvermorny. She has a brother she loves and he knows not exactly what happened to the rest of her family, but he is all she has and he has never seen anybody love their sibling quite so much as she does him. She talks about him a lot, stories from their childhood days and what they plan to do later on, perhaps when she gets a promotion. Or she did talk about him. 

She had spent a lot of time with Graves over the last year, training under him as Miss Goldstein once did. Several times when they had to stay late to finish paperwork with a few of the other aurors after big cases they'd chatted for a while, despite Graves not generally being one for small talk - he shows his affections for his aurors fairly awkwardly, with a pat on the shoulder or slap on the back followed by an insult thinly veiling pride. He had a feeling this would be like when Tina had trained under him - he was developing a soft spot for the aspiring auror, drawn to her by her spirit and compassion for her colleagues. That was his mistake.

Of course she was the one to notice something was wrong - few aurors, apart from her, Tina and several others over the years, had seen this side of him and she noticed when it didn't show anymore. She knew it wasn't him when Grindlewald demoted Goldstein, bestowed the death sentence where the real Graves had rarely done so in all his career. She'd known him too well, known too much, and suffered for it. She'd tried to warn people, tried to be heard - but the dark wizard had caught on. And just before he was exposed to wizardkind he had tortured and almost killed her brother, all while wearing Graves' face. He is still recuperating physically, and Alistaire mentally in the aftermath - Grindlewald had meant to truly break her, and Graves fears he has managed. When he came back into work she wasn't seen for two weeks, and now she is back it hurts to be around her. She once admired him, looked up to him - now she can barely look him in the eye.

Percival's head sinks lower and lower in his hands, until it meets the desk with a /thunk/. The pain grounds him, so he does it again - and again. The sound resonates as he does it repeatedly, the skin of his forehead making contact with hard wood. He doesn't hear the knock on the door before it's open and Tina Goldstein is looking at him with concern - not pity, just concern and maybe that's what makes it feel like she understands better than the others do. She knows he wants to be the way he was before, to get his old fire back - to finally be okay. And it's not okay - neither she nor he knows when or even if it's going to be okay - but until then, he has the feeling she's going to be there if he needs her, to ground him and think of him when nobody else will.

"Mr. Graves, sir?"  
"Percival, Tina. Just Percival." He feels something tugging at the corners of his mouth - perhaps the weak beginnings of a small smile.   
"Percival, are you...?" Tina trails off then - they don't simply ask one another if they're okay, because most of the time these days they know the answer already. Instead she picks up a new sentence, perhaps to avert his mind from his current turmoil.   
"Alistaire was hoping you could oversee the paperwork for her latest case allied with the Dark Forces and Entities department, sir. All the aurors are talking about it, it was exceptional - she finally produced her patronus in corporeal form, I haven't seen her do that in... Well, I don't know how long!"

He raises an eyebrow at Tina's excitement - he's noticed she's grown fond of several of their younger aurors herself, and has taken them under her wing while he wasn't here for them. He hauls himself up with a slight grunt and marches out of his office, Tina following behind. That means something - his aurors will still follow him anywhere, even now when things have been so uncertain and bonds are being built up from scratch after being broken for so long. He still has some control over this.

As he approaches the doorway to the younger auror's office, said auror surrounded by her colleagues voicing their approval and congratulations, he doesn't feel a single eye on him. And as he catches Alistaire's eye and gives a nod of approval followed by a slight grin, as she slowly then more surely looks him in the eye and /smiles back/, he feels like maybe he can still fix this.

**Author's Note:**

> Seriously, I wrote most of this from 1 am to 2 am without stopping then went to sleep and finished it at soon as I woke up, so I don't know how good this is. Sorry for those who dislike OC inserts but hopefully Alistaire's bit helped the story to flow nicely. (I didn't want sibling angst at all oh no and I didn't want Graves mentoring my new cinnamon roll OC nooooooo.) Still, if you liked her or want to see more of her then let me know! Pleas tell me what you think of this, it's my first fic for this fandom and I feel like the characters were off and I want to improve! (Please try not to be too harsh though, I'm still trying to work out how to write for this film.)


End file.
